Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions: Bizarre Gadgets You Can't Live Without

By Bathroom Readers' Institute

Discover strange gadgets you never knew existed in this volume from the nation’s top collector of curious and interesting information!
 
The writers behind Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader present this totally true treasury of amazing gizmos—devilish devices you never knew existed, created by people who thought the world absolutely needed what they had to offer and sell.
 
Read all about:
 
* The onesie that turns your crawling baby into a mop
* The fart-stifling blanket
* The square watermelon
* The video game you control with your mind
* The weight loss device that sucks food out of your stomach, and much much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781607107941

Bathroom Readers' Institute

The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

Book preview

BREATH-TO-ENERGY CONVERSION MASK

Trying to live your life in an environmentally-friendly fashion? Good for you, but…well, if you really loved your planet, you’d be doing something to help it 24/7.

Sound impossible? No, just unfeasible. Still, you’ll be making major headway if you wear the Breath Charging AIRE Mask. Just slip this thing over your face, and if you can get past the fact that it makes you look like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, you’ll be pleased to discover that the mere act of breathing in and out activates wee wind turbines within the mask. The end result: You’re creating energy that, with the appropriate attachment, can be used to charge your iPod, your iPhone…pretty much iAnything.

The AIRE mask is the brainchild of Brazilian inventor Joao Paulo Lammoglia, who trumpeted his creation in an interview with the Daily Mail, crowing, It can be used indoors or outdoors, while you’re sleeping, walking, running, or even reading a book. Lammoglia also added that its energy is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which—what a coincidence!—is exactly how often you should be helping out the planet anyway.

INSTANT DRUNKENNESS-REVERSING PILLS

Imagine being able to get rip-roaring drunk, raise hell for a few hours, and then pop a few pills and sober up quicker than you can say, I’ll be glad to walk on that line, officer! Nothing bad could possibly come of that, right?

Well we’re soon going to find out, because scientists appear to have unlocked the key to countering the intoxicating effects of alcohol: enzymes. A team of researchers led by Yunfeng Lu, a UCLA professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Cheng Ji, a professor of biochemical and molecular biology at USC, has devised a way to package enzymes inside a nanoscale polymer shell. In non-egghead speak, they found a way to put chemicals inside your body that can change what your body does. Anyway, they tested these tiny capsules on drunk mice and found that the enzymes caused their blood alcohol levels to drop quickly and significantly.

Professor Lu stated that down the road he can envision an alcohol prophylactic or an antidote that could be taken orally. The impact of this is obvious: Without an alcohol buzz, we now have zero reasons to drink domestic beer.

INSOMNIA HELMET

The concept of the head massager—a series of thin, rubber-tipped metal fingers that bend to fit over one’s skull and massage the surrounding area in the process—has been successfully mass-produced to the tune of being available for less than a buck. Those who wish to avoid being labeled a cheapskate may wish to upgrade to a device that is far costlier and much more elaborate, if not necessarily more effective.

Patented in 1992, the so-called Insomnia Helmet is lined with a series of rubber fingers attached to a belt which, courtesy of a small electric motor, repeatedly rotate within the helmet, soothingly massaging the head of its wearer in front-to-back fashion so that they can sleep better. The inventor’s pitch for the apparatus cited the importance of head massage in civilizations both human and inhuman, referencing the baboons who spend much time grooming one another’s heads to remove insects and dirt.

Since he also noted how the related act of head patting indicates approval or affection to children and adults both, here’s hoping that someone at the U.S. Patent Office rewarded him with a few good pats for his efforts.

ARTIFICIAL CHEWING HEAD

The American junk-food consumer can always rest assured that his tasty treats have been product-tested down to the last detail in focus groups, in grocery-store trials, and, of course, in the laboratory kitchen, the birthplace of so many delicious goodies that are abominations against nature. There, our brightest culinary minds examine every factor that will determine a snack’s market potential. Flavor is key, but there’s also texture, aftertaste, dunk-ability, and the all-important behavior in the mouth. Is the cracker crispy enough? Precisely how much chewing is required per bite of this soft-baked cookie? Could that new chip be somehow louder?

Clearly, snack-food impresarios spare no expense to please our palates. Yet every field of endeavor eventually bumps up against budgetary limitations, and at some point, these geniuses realized that details like crunch-testing become rather expensive when performed by actual human crunchers. So somebody devised an artificial chewing head specifically for testing snack-food crispiness. It offered a high-tech replication of mastication, complete with a built-in microphone for picking up the full spectrum of crunch noises. So nosh with confidence. Because if that chip was snacktastic enough for an animatronic head, it’s snacktacular enough for you.

ARTIFICIAL LEAVES

We all know that leaves turn sunlight into energy through the process of photosynthesis, or so we’ve been told. In an effort to one-up nature, a team of scientists at MIT has invented an artificial leaf that works just like the real thing, only better. The science is fascinating; when placed in water and exposed to sunlight, the leaf splits the H2O molecule into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen, producing clean, renewable fuel. (It also makes real leaves look like a bunch of freeloading jerks.)

It sounds, and is, weird, but theoretically, one artificial leaf placed in a bucket of water could provide enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of an average home. The inventor, Daniel Nocera, has humanitarian goals in mind: Impoverished families in third-world countries could greatly increase their standard of living if they could essentially make free energy out of rainwater.

Unfortunately, development of the leaf is at a standstill due to the expense of the specialized silicon required to make it. There are cheaper ways to make energy, so Nocera’s project has run out of investors. And because the leaf is a wonderful concept that could reduce pollution and improve innumerable lives, the governments of the world probably aren’t going to devote precious tax dollars to help make it a reality.

FLOATING SHADE

Humanity has long struggled to invent a device that wards off the sun’s harsh glare in a way that is easily portable. Well, not really—a parasol (which means for the sun in French) does the trick, as does an umbrella. Or a large-brimmed hat. Or a shelter of some sort.

But if you’re the kind of person who still proudly uses a parasol when cavorting in the park or down the promenade, then you’re probably also the kind of person who is so dainty that they tire of holding an object as light as a parasol upward for more than a few minutes.

The Floating Shade (patented in 1991) solves your problem. It’s a wide, helium-filled balloon made of extra-thick, virtually unpoppable rubber that floats directly over you and your immediate personal space. It’s tethered to your body with an elaborate series of ropes that strap on under your shoulders, resembling a parachute harness. It leaves both hands free to carry objects, read a book, talk on the phone, or use a walking stick. There’s also an extra-large, family-size model for shading a group of people and their vicinity, so long as they walk very close together.

THE ELECTRIC HICCUP CURE

Everyone has a favorite home remedy for the hiccups: quickly downing a glass of water, holding your breath for a full minute, or repeatedly blowing into a paper bag, or loudly popping that same paper bag to scare the bejeezus out of the sufferer, for example. For one inventor, though, none of these old-wives’-tale cures was nearly good enough. Perhaps he objected because they don’t actually attack the root cause of hiccups, which is an involuntary spasm of the diaphragm, resulting in a breath that’s interrupted by the involuntary closing of the glottis. Or maybe it was because those old cures didn’t involve electricity.

So he invented a cup-like appliance fitted with electrodes that make contact with the user’s mouth and temple. When the user fills the cup with water and places it over his mouth to drink, the water’s movement creates an electric charge that runs through the electrodes and stimulates a pair of nerves that help regulate the diaphragm. If it works, voilà! No more hiccups. And if it doesn’t, perhaps the very concept of the device—a combination of low-grade waterboarding and electrocution—will scare the heck out of you and cure your hiccups anyway.

3-D PRINTABLE HAMBURGERS

Meat your future. In 2012 scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands managed to grow a small strip of hamburger in a lab. They even fried it up and ate it. Their research was a major step toward creating synthetic meat and even burger patties that can be made in three-dimensional bio-printers.

These 3-D printers are nothing new (one appeared in the 2001 film Jurassic Park III). As of 2013, however, they’re only capable of creating inedible objects like the conceptual models used by architects. They can’t make you something to eat, unless your idea of a tasty snack is a miniature strip mall or a plastic condominium tower.

Using the methods employed by those Dutch scientists, creating an entire lab-grown burger patty would set you back an estimated $300,000. Fortunately, a U.S.-based company called Modern Meadow is currently developing a printer capable of cranking out much cheaper artificial meat. The bio versions of these machines are still in their infancy. One research group recently built a bio-printer capable of producing chocolate, but more sophisticated material like meat is trickier to pull off. The folks at Modern Meadow hope to create a printer that uses stem cells much in the same way a conventional office printer uses ink. Stem cells can replicate themselves many times over and turn into more sophisticated cells. Hypothetically speaking, a bio-printer could churn out a burger, so long as it has the right material in its bio-ink cartridge.

TOILET SNORKEL

Fun fact: If you’re ever trapped in a burning building, it won’t be the flames or falling debris that will kill you—it will be the smoke. A raging blaze needs oxygen to burn, so it takes that from its immediate surroundings, rudely not considering that you need that oxygen to live. Result: You die.

In 1982 William Holmes patented the Fresh-Air Breathing Device…but we’re going to go ahead and call it the Toilet Snorkel, because that’s what it is. Holmes realized that a good source of fresh air during fires in high-rise office buildings is deep inside the toilet, in the sewer line’s vent pipe. Simply snake Holmes’s slender breathing tube down through any toilet, then into the water trap and beyond, and breathe safely. Why you’re wearing a charcoal-filter fitted mask connected to a tube that’s buried in the toilet will be perfectly explainable to the firemen when they arrive.

BREATH DETECTOR

Dealing with halitosis , or bad breath, is difficult—obviously, if you knew you had bad breath, you would do something to nip it in the bud, but you can’t, because it’s pretty darn impossible to smell your own breath. That blowing into your hand and trying to smell it really fast trick just doesn’t work, so instead you hope you can treat it with prevention, like brushing your teeth eight times a day or eating box after box of breath mints.

In 1925 an inventor named George Starr White was on to something, even if he just mechanized the blowing-into-your-hand trick. His Breath Detector sought to tell a person they had bad breath before someone else could. The gadget was a handheld bellows with a straw-size opening at one end of the barrel and a narrow opening at the other. A person suspecting themselves of having bad breath was to inflate the bellows by blowing into the straw side several times. Then they would deflate the bellows by placing the narrow end in their nose and squeezing. The nose-straw makes sure that you, and only you, smell the questionable breath in question.

ANTI-STICK SPRAY

To watch the video demonstration of the chemical coating called Ultra-Ever Dry on YouTube is to be amazed at the way it repels water, refined oil, wet concrete, and other liquids from seemingly any substance. But to try and explain to Joe Average the phenomenon behind why it works without causing the words System Overload Imminent to flash before their eyes…well, that’s a little more difficult.

Basically, it all comes down to proprietary nanotechnology, if that helps. According to its maker and distributor, Ultra Tech International, Ultra-Ever Dry can be successfully used on almost any substance, from metal to plastic to cloth, and once the two-part system—a top coat and a bottom coat—has been applied, it works in temperatures ranging from -30°F to 300°F (-34°C to 149°C). If there’s any limitation to the company’s sales pitch, it’s that the process was designed for work-related functions, which as of this writing has resulted in the company apologetically noting on its website that we have not had the opportunity to test Ever Dry for use on the bottom of boats, skis, surfboards, or snowboards. They might not have, but odds are that at least one of the 3.5 million people who’ve watched their video is surfing just above the water at this very moment.

CAR KITCHENETTE

Today, we do everything in our cars. Not because we like our cars so much that we never want to leave them, per se, but because the morning and evening commutes take so long that everybody does everything in their cars out of necessity. At least we can make the claustrophobic experience a little better with satellite radio, cupholders, and steering wheel-warmers. (And a little worse with all those empty coffee cups and fast food wrappers on the floor.)

But even in the very early days of the car industry, in the Model T days, there were a number of gadgets available to help a motorist spruce up their bare-bones Ford, including a dashboard flower vase, a detachable roof, even a kitchenette. Since fast food wasn’t yet a thing (it wouldn’t take off until American car culture did, after World War II) in the 1920s, a driver had to buy a Lincoln Kitchenette. You actually had to stop to use it—on roadside picnics and camping trips—but it was a refrigerated metal cabinet that stuck onto one of the car’s running boards and folded out when needed to create a table. Inside, it held 25 pounds of ice, which kept food cold for up to 24 hours. There were also little compartments marked to hold flour meal, ice water, and eggs, which probably